Download or read book Poetry of Witness The Tradition in English 1500 2001 written by Carolyn Forché and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-01-27 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking anthology containing the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness is the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry. The 300 poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance—while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death. All bear witness to historical events and the irresistibility of their impact. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, this volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, abducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Poetry of Witness argues that such poets are a perennial feature of human history, and it presents the best of that tradition, proving that their work ranks alongside the greatest in the language.
Download or read book The Witness of Poetry written by Czesław Miłosz and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Nobel laureate reflects upon poetry's testimony to the events of our tumultuous time.
Download or read book The Trees Witness Everything written by Victoria Chang and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lover of strict form, best-selling poet Victoria Chang turns to compact Japanese waka, powerfully innovating on tradition while continuing her pursuit of one of life’s hardest questions: how to let go. In The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang reinvigorates language by way of concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior. Largely composed in various Japanese syllabic forms called “wakas,” each poem is shaped by pattern and count. This highly original work innovates inside the lineage of great poets including W.S. Merwin, whose poem titles are repurposed as frames and mirrors for the text, stitching past and present in complex dialogue. Chang depicts the smooth, melancholic isolation of the mind while reaching outward to name—with reverence, economy, and whimsy—the ache of wanting, the hawk and its shadow, our human urge to hide the minute beneath the light.
Download or read book No Bliss Like this written by Jill Hollis and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of women poets is often overlooked in anthologies, and collections of love poetry are no exception. This delightful and highly original collection shows that on the subject of romantic and sexual love, women can be just as eloquent as men -- if not more so. Here, the bitter and the sweet mingle as women from the last five hundred years write about jealousy, fickleness, exhilaration, the pain of parting, and the transience of love. Revealed is poetry which has been largely invisible since the fifteenth century; surprises from women better known for other things, like Elizabeth I and E. Nesbit; classics old and new from names including Margaret Atwood, Wendy Cope, Anne Sexton, Carol Ann Duffy, Erica Jong, Amy Lowell, Stevie Smith, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton, Adrienne Rich, Katherine Mansfield, George Eliot, and Dorothy Parker.
Download or read book What You Have Heard is True written by Carolyn Forché and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the author's deep friendship with a mysterious intellectual who introduced her to the culture and people of El Salvador in the 1970s, a tumultuous period in the country's history, inspiring her work as an unlikely activist.
Download or read book The Country Between Us written by Carolyn Forché and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1981 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where ForchE worked as a journalist and was closely involved with the political struggle in that tortured country in the late 1970's. ForchE's other poems also tend to be personal, immediate, and moving. Perhaps the final effect of her poetry is the image of a sensitive, brave, and engaged young woman who has made her life a journey. She has already traveled to many places, as these poems indicate, but beyond that is the sense of someone who is, in Ignazio Silone's words, coming from far and going far.
Download or read book The Poet X written by Elizabeth Acevedo and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award! Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth. Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club, she doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can’t stop thinking about performing her poems. Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent. “Crackles with energy and snaps with authenticity and voice.” —Justina Ireland, author of Dread Nation “An incredibly potent debut.” —Jason Reynolds, author of the National Book Award Finalist Ghost “Acevedo has amplified the voices of girls en el barrio who are equal parts goddess, saint, warrior, and hero.” —Ibi Zoboi, author of American Street This young adult novel, a selection of the Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List, is an excellent choice for accelerated tween readers in grades 6 to 8. Plus don't miss Elizabeth Acevedo's With the Fire on High and Clap When You Land!
Download or read book Blood Dazzler written by Patricia Smith and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2013-11-18 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category Five storm with its “scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent,” to the heartbreaking aftermath, these poems evoke the horror that unfolded in New Orleans as America watched it on television. Assuming the voices of flailing politicians, the dying, their survivors, and the voice of the hurricane itself, Smith follows the woefully inadequate relief effort and stands witness to families held captive on rooftops and in the Superdome. She gives voice to the thirty-four nursing home residents who drowned in St. Bernard Parish and recalls the day after their deaths when George W. Bush accompanied country singer Mark Willis on guitar: The cowboy grins through the terrible din, *** And in the Ninth, a choking woman wails Look like this country done left us for dead. An unforgettable reminder that poetry can still be “news that stays news,” Blood Dazzler is a necessary step toward national healing. Patricia Smith is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including Teahouse of the Almighty, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. A record-setting, national poetry slam champion, she was featured in the film Slamnation, on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, and is a frequent contributor to Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog. Visit her website at www.wordwoman.ws.
Download or read book Against Forgetting written by Carolyn Forché and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 1993 with total page 812 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern poems deal with genocide, wars, revolutions, the Holocaust, political repression, apartheid, and the democracy movement in China
Download or read book Poetry as Testimony written by Antony Rowland and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes Holocaust poetry, war poetry, working-class poetry, and 9/11 poetry as forms of testimony. Rowland argues that testamentary poetry requires a different approach to traditional ways of dealing with poems due to the pressure of the metatext (the original, traumatic events), the poems’ demands for the hyper-attentiveness of the reader, and a paradox of identification that often draws the reader towards identifying with the poet’s experience, but then reminds them of its sublimity. He engages with the work of a diverse range of twentieth-century authors and across the literature of several countries, even uncovering new archival material. The study ends with an analysis of the poetry of 9/11, engaging with the idea that it typifies a new era of testimony where global, secondary witnesses react to a proliferation of media images. This book ranges across the literature of several countries, cultures, and historical events in order to stress the large variety of contexts in which poetry has functioned productively as a form of testimony, and to note the importance of the availability of translations to the formation of literary canons.
Download or read book The Kitchen Dweller s Testimony written by Ladan Osman and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony asks: Whose testimony is valid? Whose testimony is worth recording? Osman’s speakers, who are almost always women, assert and reassert in an attempt to establish authority, often through persistent questioning. Specters of race, displacement, and colonialism are often present in her work, providing momentum for speakers to reach beyond their primary, apparent dimensions and better communicate. The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony is about love and longing, divorce, distilled desire, and all the ways we injure ourselves and one another.
Download or read book Witness I Am written by Gregory Scofield and published by Harbour Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witness, I Am is divided into three gripping sections of new poetry from one of Canada’s most recognized poets. The first part of the book, “Dangerous Sound,” contains contemporary themed poems about identity and belonging, undone and rendered into modern sound poetry. “Muskrat Woman,” the middle part of the book, is a breathtaking epic poem that considers the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women through the reimagining and retelling of a sacred Cree creation story. The final section of the book, “Ghost Dance,” raids the autobiographical so often found in Scofield’s poetry, weaving the personal and universal into a tapestry of sharp poetic luminosity. From “Killer,” Scofield eerily slices the dreadful in with the exquisite: “I could, this day of proficient blooms, / take your fingers, / tie them down one by one. This one for the runaway, / this one for the joker, / this one for the sass-talker, / this one for the judge, / this one for the jury. / Oh, I could kill you.”
Download or read book Bearing Witness written by Margaret Hatcher and published by Zephyr Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this poetry anthology is to create a positive inspirational yet realistic picture of teachers and the very challenging and complex contexts within which they "weave their magic in students' lives" and make contributions to the world. The anthology aims to show how teachers think and feel about teaching, learning, and their students. It seeks to offer a glimpse of teachers' inner lives, how they learn and grow as persons, and something of the context in which they must teach and in which they serve their profession, communities, and world. The anthology consists of 120 carefully selected poems by 70 poet-teachers--topics run the gamut from teenage suicide to the joy of lighting a student's inner fire, and from child abuse to celebrating the child who stands up for others. (NKA)
Download or read book Word and Witness written by Sally Buckner and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dazzling array of poems preserves in precise and imaginative language many of the crucial perceptions, dreams, experiences, and concerns of North Carolinians during this exceptional century. The quietest personal moments, the noisiest public conflicts, the most profound social issues--all are treated in these 252 poems representing 137 poets whose work spans the last century. Word and Witness demonstrates the development of poetry--remarkable in both quantity and quality--occurring through these tumultuous decades, as well as the extraordinary versatility of the poets who have, during significant years, called North Carolina home. Edited by Sally Buckner, Word and Witness is organized chronologically, with each section prefaced by an introduction explaining the literary scene during those years and the factors--social, economic, and historic--which influenced the poetry of that era. Fred Chappell, North Carolina Poet Laureate and winner of the national Bollingen Prize for poetry, has furnished the Afterword. Partially funded by a grant from the North Carolina Arts Council, the book includes brief biographies, a selected bibliography, and lists of poets who have won significant state awards. The compilation of Word and Witness was conceived and sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society, the oldest and largest organization devoted to poetry in this state. Like North Carolina's 400 Years: Signs Along the Way, one of the four other anthologies created by NCPS since its inception in 1932, this collection is designed as a gift to the state, commemorating North Carolina's rich literary heritage. It also testifies to the breadth and depth of the state's exceptional community of writers.
Download or read book Steeple Bush written by Robert Frost and published by . This book was released on 1947 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Typescripts of contents and text of Steeple bush (New York, 1947), together with proof of Limited edition notice and sample page of text.
Download or read book The Book of Light written by Lucille Clifton and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a powerful introduction by Ross Gay and a moving afterword by Sidney Clifton, this special anniversary edition of The Book of Light offers new meditations and insights on one of the most beloved voices of the 20th century. Though The Book of Light opens with thirty-nine names for light, we soon learn the most meaningful name is Lucille—daughter, mother, proud Black woman. Known for her ability to convey multitudes in few words, Clifton writes into the shadows—her father’s violations, a Black neighborhood bombed, death, loss—all while illuminating the full spectrum of human emotion: grief and celebration, anger and joy, empowerment and so much grace. A meeting place of myth and the Divine, The Book of Light exists “between starshine and clay” as Clifton’s personas allow us to bear the world’s weight with Atlas and witness conversations between Lucifer and God. While names and dates mark this text as a social commentary responding to her time, it is haunting how easily this collection serves as a political palimpsest of today. We leave these poems inspired—Clifton shows us Superman is not our hero. Our hero is the Black female narrator who decides to live. And what a life she creates! “Won’t you celebrate with me?”
Download or read book Love s Witness written by Jill Hollis and published by Carroll & Graf Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting verse from the last five hundred years on the joys, sorrows, and mysteries of the love relationship, this fun, insightful book includes the work of Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, George Eliot, and Queen Elizabeth I, among others. Reprint.
